Users commonly employ several electronic devices, such as desktop computers, laptop computers, tablet computers, gaming systems, smart phones, and so on, over the course of a single day. Typically, some commonality in terms of applications, services, and other functionality may exist among multiple such devices, often leading to a commonality of content that is stored on the various devices, or that is otherwise accessible via the devices. Such content may include, for example, music or other audio files, video files, still image files, and text or document files.
In some applications executed on a user device, and in some services accessed over the Internet or other wide area network (WAN) by way of the device, the application or service may employ an identification of the user of the device to facilitate access to the application or service, to provide personalized content and/or functionality based on the identity of the user, and enable other user-specific actions.
However, users are increasingly wary of providing personal identifying information over the Internet due to ever-growing concerns of identity theft and the desire to remain anonymous. Web-based cookies, device media access control (MAC) addresses, and similar types of device and user identification are increasingly unavailable on mobile devices. Further, application tokens, server-based tokens, and other similar forms of anonymous user identification available from a server typically involve the use of an active Internet connection to access the tokens and, more importantly, aren't uniformly shared across the applications on mobile or embedded devices.